Ertebolle

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’

Sure, but my point is that this is more like a 10% discount than a 20% one. (For me at least if they knocked 20% off the low end model I’d probably jump on it, but 10% feels like the sort of thing that happens every month)

10% on the 64GB one, though; 15 and 20% on the higher-capacity versions, but thanks to the recent drop in SSD prices those are more expensive than they should be even with the discount.

Mr Musk had initially rushed to embrace the news when Jenna, formally known as Xavier, transitioned at age 16.

To me this suggests that he first thought it would seem hip and contrarian to support his trans daughter, then he realized that actually the people he considers hip and contrarian are all about hating on trans kids now, and so swiftly pivoted to doing that. (I don’t imagine he had any strong feelings about his daughter as a person either way - it’s not like he was around for her childhood changing diapers or whatever)

For games, my suggestion is that you try a whole bunch of them; get Google Play Pass and, if you have a Netflix subscription, browse through the list of Neflix Games and try anything that looks remotely appealing. None of these are gambling or freemium - they have no way to make money from you except for your continued subscription - and there’s something for pretty much every conceivable genre.

If you can give any guidance about the specific sorts of things you like from games (action, story, puzzles, building stuff) I’m sure people can recommend some specific titles.

This - a lot of people don’t know this, but the beginner method for solving Rubik’s cubes is pretty straightforward algorithm that anyone can memorize; competitive speed cubers use a much more complicated one, but even with the beginner method, with enough practice you can get your times down to under a minute.

Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.

No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.

It’s not as useful for day-to-day budgeting as a more granular one, but people generally only look at their finances closely once a year at tax time and so it’s a good point of comparison for that; get a sense of how your financial life is evolving.

It’s also the number you’re asked for on tax forms, other financial forms (loans, financial aid, bank accounts), questionnaires (though you can lie or ‘prefer not to say’ on those)… comes up a lot, basically.

Sure, but after years of fucking one can eventually find oneself feeling a biological urge to procreate as well.

It’s not a blood superiority thing, dude - we’re instinctually driven to procreate. If for whatever reason you can’t or don’t want to do that, you can adopt a kid and love them exactly as much and in exactly the same way as you would your biological offspring, but the idea of conceiving and bearing a child appeals to a very basic part of human nature for a lot of us.

Yeah, everyone I know who adopted did so as a last resort and had a long expensive miserable slog of it; once you get through that experience it’s just as satisfying as having a biological kid, but it’s no picnic.

My impression has always been that the actual risk was vastly overstated; per Wikipedia:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said in 1958, “Most people agreed with Mayor La Guardia of New York in dismissing it as a ‘cocktail putsch’”.[51] In Schlesinger’s summation of the affair in 1958, “No doubt, MacGuire did have some wild scheme in mind, though the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable, and it can hardly be supposed that the Republic was in much danger.”[10]

Historian Robert F. Burk wrote, “At their core, the accusations probably consisted of a mixture of actual attempts at influence peddling by a small core of financiers with ties to veterans organizations and the self-serving accusations of Butler against the enemies of his pacifist and populist causes.”[7]

Historian Hans Schmidt wrote, “Even if Butler was telling the truth, as there seems little reason to doubt, there remains the unfathomable problem of MacGuire’s motives and veracity. He may have been working both ends against the middle, as Butler at one point suspected. In any case, MacGuire emerged from the HUAC hearings as an inconsequential trickster whose base dealings could not possibly be taken alone as verifying such a momentous undertaking. If he was acting as an intermediary in a genuine probe, or as agent provocateur sent to fool Butler, his employers were at least clever enough to keep their distance and see to it that he self-destructed on the witness stand.”[8]

There are a couple sneaky ways states are trying to get around this.

The biggest one is the NPVIC - basically, states representing a majority of electoral votes (considerably fewer than the 3/4 required to ratify a constitutional amendment) would enter into an interstate compact agreeing to award all of their electoral votes - and hence the presidency - to whoever wins the national popular vote.

It might be struck down as unconstitutional, but it also might not - states have a lot of power over how to allocate their electoral votes. But even getting to the needed 270 electoral votes is a stretch; we’re currently at 205, but that includes most of the low-hanging fruit, because populous hard-right states like Texas tend to view the current system as favoring Republicans (and indeed the 4 presidents in the last 150 years elected despite losing the popular vote were all Republicans) and so even if a popular vote would bolster their national influence they’re still against it. And the non-Republican-dominated states that haven’t entered it yet - MI/WI/PA/AZ/NV/GA/NC/NH - are all presidential swing states that enjoy outsized influence under the current system and have no incentive to disrupt it.

So realistically, the only way to eliminate the electoral college would be for a Democrat to win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote, thus gaining support from hard-right state legislatures eager to delegitimize the election winner.

I’d probably use it more if there was a browser/desktop app. But I’ve got like 1% as many followers there as I do on Mastodon, so I don’t think I’d post anything regardless.

Threads seems to have achieved its immediate strategic goal of setting fire to zombie Twitter so that it’d stay dead; building it into an actual Twitter replacement could take years, and in the meanwhile there’s plenty of time for Mastodon et al to keep hoovering up users too.

Personally, I don’t post anything on Threads, and haven’t really tried to obtain any followers there, but I do log on and view/like content from famous people I used to follow on Twitter in the hopes that if they get enough engagement on Threads they’ll cut out Twitter altogether.

Parent here, very badly envious of all y’all’s numbers.

(but in my pre-kid days I’m sure I put in at least 300 hours on the pre-Steam version of Dwarf Fortress)

I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.

If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn’t have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.